An aggregate approach to model evacuee behavior for no-notice evacuation operations

This study proposes an aggregate approach to model evacuee behavior in the context of no-notice evacuation operations. It develops aggregate behavior models for evacuation decision and evacuation route choice to support information-based control for the real-time stage-based routing of individuals in the affected areas. The models employ the mixed logit structure to account for the heterogeneity across the evacuees. In addition, due to the subjectivity involved in the perception and interpretation of the ambient situation and the information received, relevant fuzzy logic variables are incorporated within the mixed logit structure to capture these characteristics. Evacuation can entail emergent behavioral processes as the problem is characterized by a potential threat from the extreme event, time pressure, and herding mentality. Simulation experiments are conducted for a hypothetical terror attack to analyze the models’ ability to capture the evacuation-related behavior at an aggregate level. The results illustrate the value of using a mixed logit structure when heterogeneity is pronounced. They further highlight the benefits of incorporating fuzzy logic to enhance the prediction accuracy in the presence of subjective and linguistic elements in the problem.     

Crash risk factors associated with injury severity of teen drivers

This paper focuses on identifying crash risk factors associated with injury severity of teen drivers. Crash data obtained from the Highway Safety and Information System (HSIS) for the entire state of North Carolina, for years 2011 to 2013, was used for analysis and modeling. Among all the crashes during the study period, a total of 62,990 crashes involving teen drivers (15 to 19?years) were analyzed. A partial proportionality odds model was developed to identify factors contributing to injury severity of teen drivers. The results obtained indicate that teen drivers driving sports utility vehicles and pickup trucks are more likely to be severely injured when compared to teen drivers driving passenger cars. Teen drivers are more likely to be severely injured on weekdays, particularly during peak hours. The chances of teen drivers getting involved in severe injury crashes on Tuesdays and Fridays is higher when compared to Sundays. Age, gender, road configuration, terrain, adverse weather condition, and access control are observed to have a significant effect on teen driver's injury severity.     

Analysis of the factors that influence the relationship between business air travel and videoconferencing

This paper seeks to investigate the relationship between business air travel and videoconferencing for intra-firm communication using econometric models developed through survey data from Taiwan’s technology industry. The survey respondents include business firms that either use or do not use videoconferencing currently. Based on survey data analyses, negative binomial models are developed for the set of current adopters of videoconferencing, and a Poisson regression model is developed for the non-adopters. They suggest substitution relationships between business air travel and videoconferencing for the two groups. However, the substitution effect is perceptibly stronger when videoconferencing is used as a substitute for business air travel. The analysis highlights that the meeting context significantly influences the choice of the communication mechanism; meeting contexts that do not specifically require face-to-face interaction tend to foster increased videoconferencing usage. Further, the perceptions of the respondents in terms of the relative benefits and weaknesses of each communication option influence the likelihood of substitution.     

Exploring pedestrian surrogate safety measures by road geometry at midblock crosswalks: A perspective under mixed traffic conditions

Pedestrian safety is generally assessed using frequency of crashes, based on historical data, for a given transportation facility. However, the lack of good and reliable crash data has hampered its apposite analyses and in evaluating the effectiveness of pedestrian safety programs. To overcome this gap, traffic conflict technique (TCT) which relies mainly on the observations of critical traffic situations for safety analysis were developed. However, the applicability of TCTs and related measures under varying non-lane based heterogeneous traffic conditions prevailing in countries such as India is not widely explored. This paper attempts to evaluate pedestrian safety at urban midblock crosswalk using different surrogate safety measures, including vehicle crossing speed, post encroachment time (PET), yielding compliance of driver as well as pedestrian, and conflict rate. The number of conflicts were observed to increase as the average vehicle crossing speed increases, indicating that pedestrians are extremely vulnerable while crossing the road. The PET value for the smaller vehicles, such as two-wheelers and three-wheelers, is recorded to be lower than the heavy vehicles, such as trucks and buses. With the addition of one lane, there is a significant decrease in the PET value. The average PET values for the vehicle on eight-lane divided road is less than the six-lane divided, four-lane divided, and two-lane undivided roads. Further, the yielding compliance of the driver as well as of the pedestrian depends on the crossing speed of the approaching vehicle and the type of road geometry. Further, the rate and severity of conflicts increased with a decrease in the pedestrian crossing speed. The yielding behaviour of the drivers as well as the pedestrian's yielding compliance varies by location, highlighting the effect of individual and demographic characteristics on pedestrian crossing behaviour.     

汽车组装中的自动化接合技术

百余年来,整车组装的零部件接合工艺主要依赖焊接、螺栓螺母紧固等传统机械手段,而胶合、缝合等技术仅限于内饰装配等少数几个环节。随着热塑性材料等各类新材料在现代汽车工业中的逐渐普及,零部件与金属底盘的接合工艺也在不断演进。一开始,新型的、替代性的接合技术在应用上有比较大的局限性,短期内不见得能取代传统工艺,比如点焊的地位,因为今后10年,也就是到2020年左右,汽车设计已经基本定型。     

Inclusion of speed and weather measures in safety performance functions for rural roadways

The research on relationships among vehicle operating speed, roadway design elements, weather, and traffic volume on crash outcomes will greatly benefit the road safety profession in general. If these relationships are well understood and characterized, existing techniques and countermeasures for reducing crash frequencies and crash severities could potentially improve, and the opportunity for new methodologies addressing and anticipating crash occurrence would naturally ensue. This study examines the prevailing operating speeds on a large scale and determines how traffic speeds and different speed measures interact with roadway characteristics and weather condition to influence the likelihood of crashes. This study used three datasets from Washington and Ohio: 1) Highway Safety Information System (HSIS), 2) the National Performance Management Research Dataset (NPMRDS), and 3) National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) weather data. State-based conflated databases were developed using the linear conflation of HSIS and NPMRDS. The results show that certain speed measures were found to be beneficial in quantifying safety risk. Annual-level crash prediction models show that increased variability in hourly operating speed within a day and an increase in monthly operating speeds within a year are both associated with a higher number of crashes. Safety practitioners can benefit from the current study in addressing the issue of speed and weather in crash outcomes.     

Vehicle routing problem and driver behaviour: a review and framework for analysis

Vehicle routing problems (VRPs) whose typical objective is to minimise total travel costs over a tour have evolved over the years with objectives ranging from minimising travel times and distances to minimising pollution and fuel consumption. However, driver behaviour continues to be neglected while planning for vehicle routes. Factors such as traffic congestion levels, monotonous drives and fatigue have an impact on the behaviour of drivers, which in turn might affect their speed-choice and route-choice behaviours. The behaviour of drivers and their subsequent decision-making owing to these factors impact the revenue of transport companies and could lead to huge losses in extreme cases. There have been studies on the behaviour of drivers in isolation, without inclusion of the objectives and constraints of the traditional routing problem. This paper presents a review of existing models of VRP, planner behaviour models in the VRP context and driver behaviour models and provides a motivation to integrate these models in a stochastic traffic environment to produce practical, economic and driver-friendly logistics solutions. The paper provides valuable insights on the relevance of behavioural issues in logistics and highlights the modelling implications of incorporating planner and driver behaviour in the framework of routing problems.     

Online calibration of an integrated framework for information‐based evacuation operations

This study seeks to online calibrate the parameters of aggregate evacuee behavior models used in a behavior‐consistent information‐based control module for determining information strategies for real‐time evacuation operations. It enables the deployment of an operational framework for mass evacuation that integrates three aspects underlying an evacuation operation: demand (evacuee behavior), supply (network management), and disaster characteristics. To attain behavior‐consistency, the control module factors evacuees' likely responses to the disseminated information in determining information‐based control strategies. Hence, the ability of the behavior models to predict evacuees' likely responses is critical to the effectiveness of traffic routing by information strategies. The mixed logit structure is used for the aggregate behavior models to accommodate the behavioral heterogeneity across the population. An online calibration problem is proposed to calibrate the random parameters in the behavior models by using the least square estimator to minimize the gap between the predicted network flows and unfolding traffic dynamics. Background traffic, an important but rarely studied issue for modeling evacuation traffic, is also accounted for in the proposed problem. Numerical experiments are conducted to illustrate the importance of the calibration problem for addressing the system consistency issues and integrating the demand, supply, and disaster characteristics for more efficient evacuation operations. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Performance characterisation for risk assessment of striking ship impacts based on struck ship damaged volume

Ship collision accidents are rare events but pose huge threat to human lives, assets, and the environment. Many researchers have sought for effective models that compute ship stochastic response during collisions by considering the variability of ship collision scenario parameters. However, the existing models were limited by the capability of the collision computational models and did not completely capture collision scenario, and material and geometric uncertainties. In this paper, a novel framework to performance characterisation of ships in collision involving a variety of striking ships is developed, by characterising the structural consequences with efficient response models. A double-hull oil carrier is chosen as the struck ship to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed framework. Response surface techniques are employed to generate the most probable input design sets which are used to sample an automated finite element tool to compute the chosen structural consequences. The resulting predictor-response relationships are fitted with suitable surrogate models to probabilistically characterise the struck ship damage under collisions. As demonstrated in this paper, such models are extremely useful to reduce the computational complexity in obtaining probabilistic design measures for ship structures. The proposed probabilistic approach is also combined with available collision frequency models from literature to demonstrate the risk tolerance computations.